Questions to ask while analysing foregrounding
Foregrounding
The term foregrounding is self-explanatory – to assure the hierarchy of meanings they are given artistic emphasis which brings them to the foreground.
The idea of foregrounding appeared in different linguistic schools: the Prague School (P.L. Garvin), English School (M.A.K. Halliday, G.N. Leech, M.N. Short), American School (S. Levin). It was productively worked out and systematised by a prominent Russian linguist Irina Vladimirovna Arnold (1908-2010, St. Petersburg) and her followers.
From the point of view of Decoding Stylistics which concentrates mainly on the reader’s perception of the text of literature, foregrounding comprises both additional regularities and additional irregularities and may be regarded as a level above that of tropes. The notion of foregrounding is more comprehensive than that of a stylistic device or trope. Foregrounding may cover bigger parts of texts containing several devices.
Foregrounding is a special contextual organization focusing the reader’s attention on some elements of the contents of the message and establishing meaningful relations between juxtaposed or distant elements of the same or different levels and the text as a whole.
Under the general heading of foregrounding the following phenomena are included: coupling, convergence, defeated expectancy, semantic repetition, salient feature, intertextuality. They differ from expressive means known as tropes and stylistic figures because they possess a generalising force and function and provide structural cohesion of the text and the hierarchy of its meanings and images, brining some to the fore and shifting others to the background. They also enhance the aesthetic effect and memorability.
In what follows we shall give a brief description of some of these types of foregrounding.
Coupling is defined as a semantically relevant appearance of equivalent elements in equivalent positions in the text. Coupling was suggested and worked out by the American scholar S. Levin whose contribution is valuable because he managed to show almost universal character of coupling.
The possibilities of coupling are almost unlimited. It occurs on every level. In poetry a well studied example is the rhyme. The equivalence of the elements of the code is manifested in a certain resemblance or identity of sounds occurring in equivalent positions according to a certain scheme (mostly but not necessarily on the ends of lines). Rhymes play an important role in a poem’s composition and in the segmentation into meaningful parts intensifying the aesthetic effect and memorability. They signal the ends of the lines, define the structure of the stanza and play an important part in creating the musical effect.
|
|
|
Coupling is especially pronounced in poetry, in proverbs, in aphorisms.
For example, the final couplet of Sonnet 18 by Shakespeare:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see
So long lives this and this gives life to thee.
Coupling here serves to join two of Shakespeare’s key themes – that of all-destroying time and the power of poetry opposing time and making beauty immortal. Its most obvious part is the anaphoric repetition: So long … So long. This is sustained by elements whose equivalence is synonymic: can breathe, can see, live – all these render the same notion – life – and occupy syntactically equivalent positions. Finally, anadiplosis is also a form of coupling, more sophisticated than all others: the pronoun this whose referent is the whole sonnet, is the last word of the first half-line and the first word in the second half-line.
Many proverbs are structured by means of coupling. For example: Lend your money and lose your friend. The patterning is quite marked. The equivalence of position is syntactic and the equivalence of elements lexical and phonetic, it stresses the ironical idea that lending money to friends is a double loss because demanding one’s money back is futile and will make the friend angry. There are many points of similarity emphasising the contrast and identity of situations referred to, and the logical coherence of the whole.
Coupling has many points of similarity with parallelism but parallelism is above all associated with syntactic repetition, and in coupling other types of positional equivalence are also possible.
Defeated Expectancy is a type of foregrounding when some element of the text receives prominence due to an interruption in the pattern of predictability. An unexpected change may be created due to some combination of extra regularity and extra irregularity. The low predictability elements disturb the pattern which the reader has been conditioned to expect. This causes a temporary sense of disorientation compelling the reader’s attention.
|
|
|
Defeated expectancy is mostly characteristic of humour and satire. The following example will make this point clear:
A drunken G.I. shouts to his companion: “I cannot take another minute of it! The Army is brutal, dehumanized and full of morons. It’s time something was done. When I get back to the barracks, I’ll write my mother about it’.
Defeated expectancy results from a glaring discrepancy between the decision taken and the scale of the denunciation of the state of things in the army. The first three sentences make the reader expect that the soldier is ready for some action of revolt, and when we learn that all he is prepared to do is to complain to his mother, this is unexpected and amusingly childish. The decision is made prominent being abruptly detached from the rest of the context.
Convergence is a type of foregrounding based on the principals of reiteration and redundancy. In convergence several stylistic devices converge to produce one striking effect, to create one image or to fulfill some other function together. The type is rather interesting because in it the relationship and difference between foregrounding and stylistic devices is most transparent.
In “A Portrait of the artist as a Young Man” J. Joyce depicts his protagonist in the state of exultation:
His cheeks were aflame, his body was aglow, his limbs were trembling. On and on and on he strode far out over the sands singing wildly to the sea, crying to greet the life that had cried to him.
The reader feels how excited the hero is as he perceives the anaphoric parallel constructions, high-flown archaic metaphoric synonyms aflame and aglow used as epithets, insistent repetition of on, rendering unstoppable energy of motion, metaphorical personification of life – all these make the reader share the hero’s feelings.
Salient Feature is a type of foregrounding based on the emphasis created by some prominent, important, interesting in different respects, or salient features of the text. This type of foregrounding helps solving the basic question of all text interpretation – how can we check our intuition and prove that our understanding is correct. The idea of salient feature is a modification of the so-called ‘philological cycle’ or ‘cycle of understanding’ described by Leo Spitzer. The metaphorical terms ‘philological cycle’ or ‘cycle of understanding’ are justified because the procedure demands a to-and-fro movement from linguistic peculiarity to a literary explanation. Linguistic observation stimulates and checks the literary insight, and this in turn stimulates further observation in which lexical proof is especially important. It must be emphasised that a salient feature proves a convenient starting point for an analysis that is further continued on the basis of other types of foregrounding. To see this let us examine the 66 Sonnet by W. Shakespeare.
|
|
|
Tired with all these, for restful death I cry,
As to behold desert a beggar born,
And needy nothing trimmed in jollity,
And purest faith unhappily forsworn,
And gilded honour shamefully misplaced,
And maiden virtue rudely strumpeted,
And right perfection wrongfully disgraced,
And strength by limping sway disabled,
And art made tongue-tied by authority,
And folly doctor-like controlling skill,
And simple truth miscalled simplicity,
And captive good attending captain ill:
Tired of all these, from this world I be gone,
Save that, to die, I leave my love alone.
There are several salient features in this famous poem. One of the most obvious peculiarities is the polysyndeton i.e. the repetition in close succession of the conjunction and in the beginning of ten lines out of fourteen.
Searching for an explanation, one sees that and links together object clauses to the verb behold (=see) and reduces a multitude of things to unity in one vast canvas. But a canvas of what? To explain this one pays attention to the fact that the canvas is structured as a coupling in a series of parallel constructions. Its equivalent elements – a series of nouns given prominence by the preceding and have a common dominator – a strongly marked evaluative seme of ethical character, they are also semantically equivalent because they denote ethical categories (virtue, faith, perfection), a third point of equivalence is that they are marked by syncretism, they denote not only the qualities but also people personifying them.
|
|
|
One more salient feature is that the sonnet is divided vertically; there is a pause after each of the noun phrases. In the right-hand side of the poem another set of the parallel constructions is correlated with the first. The pattern is again clear-cut. Participle 2 of the verbs meaning to do great wrong to is enhanced by adverbs of the strongest negative evaluation: unhappily, shamefully, rudely, etc.
A third type of foregrounding present is that of contrast. Everything good is wronged and everything evil prospers. This prompts the most important step of interpretation – the canvas drawn is that of universal injustice and cruelty that makes the poet indignant. The first insights thus justified the reader is stimulated for further careful interpretation of every linguistic detail.
Thus we see that the salient feature may take different forms and functions.
By conclusion of the unit devoted to the principle of foregrounding it should be noted that text of all kinds, in the widest meaning of this term as used in semiotics, i.e. any work of art and science, are an indispensable part of every national culture, being the main vehicles and instruments of storing information and passing it through time and space, transmitting cultural achievements from one generation to the next.
Theory of interpretation finds ways of prompting, directing and checking the reader’s intuition with the help of observing the vocabulary and its contextual organisation in texts of various size and scope.
Questions to ask while analysing foregrounding
1. What is foregrounding?
2. What are the main types of foregrounding?
3. Give a brief description of coupling.
4. Give a brief description of defeated expectancy.
5. Give a brief description of convergence.
6. Give a brief description of salient feature.
Дата добавления: 2022-06-11; просмотров: 36; Мы поможем в написании вашей работы! |
Мы поможем в написании ваших работ!